Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore

Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore

Of picking, washing and cleaning my pretty little toes, which he took great delight in, and in which pleasurable, innocent, and inoffensive pastime he as often spent hours; twas the greatest gratification to him on earth, nor did he (said she) indulge in any other in all the time we spent together, he never was even rude enough to give me a kiss. So emerged the first expose of foot fetishism in the eighteenth-century. Revelations and racy anecdotes about the lives of the rich and famous of Dublin and London abound within Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore. From a violent domestic background, Peg blitzed her way through balls and masquerades creating scandals and gossip wherever she went, leaving dukes, barristers and lieutenants stranded in her wake. She was the first madame ever to write her memoirs, thereby setting the template for the whore's memoir. She wrote not merely to reveal herself but to expose the shoddy behaviour of others and her account of her life. In Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore, Julie Peakman brings her subject and the world through which she moved to glorious, bawdy life.

Author description

Dr. Julie Peakman is a well-known for her work as a historian in eighteenth-century culture, sexuality (all eras) and pornography. She is Honorary Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is a frequent contributor to journals, magazines and television documentaries for BBC, Channel 4 and the Biography Channel. Her first book Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave 2003) was met with acclaim, her second book Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century (Atlantic Books, 2004) was a more light-hearted romp through the eighteenth-century sexual underworld. Her last book was The Pleasure's All Mine. A History of Perverse Sex (Reaktion, 2013).

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